Ville d'Avray, white houses

Ville d'Avray, White Houses places Seurat in one of the villages west of Paris most associated with French landscape painting: Corot had painted there for decades, and the area's combination of ponds, woodland, and white-walled houses made it a favourite excursion destination for Parisian artists. By painting it in 1882 Seurat was inserting himself consciously into that history while approaching the subject with his own emerging tonal system. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which holds the canvas, is one of Britain's strongest regional museum collections of French nineteenth-century painting, acquiring works that entered the market through various channels of French private dispersal.

White architectural surfaces in landscape present the challenge of rendering reflected colour within an apparently neutral tone. Seurat identifies the cool and warm passages of reflected sky and ground light within the white walls, using subtle shifts in grey and ochre to make the houses read as solid forms in space.